Bill Cosby’s criminal trial for his alleged 2004 sexual assault of Andrea Constand could start early next summer.
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Bill Cosby will stand trial in June, 2017 as he fights three charges of aggravated indecent assault. One was a flight attendant.
On Tuesday, prosecutors also filed a motion to have 13 unnamed women, who Cosby is said to have sexually assaulted, testify during that trail.
Cosby’s defense team has undergone a major shakeups during his legal proceedings.
The lawyers say he didn’t know Gianna Constand was recording when he called her in Pickering, Ontario, from his home in California. Another said she felt woozy and had blurred vision after he insisted she take a couple of pills. Even though the women have not been publicly identified, they will probably be the subject of strenuous investigations by news organizations, given what the judge said was the “acute national interest” in the case.
The defense is also trying to prevent a damning recorded conversation between Bill Cosby and the mother of Andrea Constand, as well as a sworn deposition Cosby previously gave in the case (to a former district attorney, the district attorney who lost his job to the current district attorney) from being heard at his sexual assault trial.
At the hearing, prosecutors filed a motion asking the judge for permission to call 13 of the almost 50 women who have accused Cosby of sexual assault as witnesses. Cosby said he dodged her questions because he feared he was being recorded.
Cosby has been accused of drugging and raping a former Temple University employee at his home in 2004.
And McMonagle wasted little time in painting his client as the true victim while going after Gloria Allred, the high-profile attorney representing Constand.
“We have seen a barrage of new accusers claiming, ‘Me too, ‘” Agrusa said.
Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt has meanwhile issued a statement blaming lawyers for the women for “the trampling of Mr. Cosby’s civil rights”. “I have a parrot”.
Allred called the attack “desperate” and “pathetic” in a statement.
Attorney Gloria Allred rejected accusations by Cosby’s spokesman Andrew Wyatt that her representation of several women accusing the comedian of drugging and sexually abusing them was built on racial bias and prejudice.
She said the case is not about racial bias, but whether Cosby “has committed acts of gender sexual violence”.
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If the prosecution is allowed to call the other women as witnesses, it would bring to a legal forum what until now has played out predominantly in the media. He suggested the pool of potential jurors in Montgomery County had been tainted because the Constand case became a major campaign issue when District Attorney KevinSteele ran for office a year ago. Prosecutors filed the request to include 13 of 60 alleged victims’ testimonies to establish a history of “prior bad acts”.
